Reply #13: You know you're [View All]

[Joe Chi Minh]

ploughing the hardest furrow, out of love of your brother, bleedingheart, so don't listen to your critics in this matter. Even if they believed that what you are doing is both right and courageous, I wonder if, in your shoes, they would do as much. Rightly or wrongly, I suspect they may have addictive problems, themselves, so sympathise with your brother from a position of similar mutual anguish and frsutration. Though maybe not.

If it's alcohol, they may be just heavy drinkers, and if most of your your family are too, they may be what I believe experts in this field call "co-alcoholics". People close to the alcoholic, who, despite sometimes angry and/or self-pitying criticism of the person concerned, are actually pleased when they succumb, as it gives them power over them.

I knew a person in that particular circumstance. One of her brothers was an alcoholic, the other brother and her mother heavy drinkers. Her mother, while she lived, was a tremendous problem. When my friend succumbed to drink, she was the first to "drop" her, and indeed would bitterly, bitterly complain about her. Yet such a shocking co-alcoholic was she, that she even said to her on occasions, "There's nothing worse than a reformed alcoholic!" I mean that beggars belief, and had I not known her, I would have thought that it cried to Heaven for vengeance.

But there were many other ways in which she dragged her down. One such was that she used to phone her every evening giving her the latest news of who in her family was in good odour with her and who was the new devil's spawn, so to speak, and complaining bitterly about them; continually setting the other members of the family against each other. The relationship between mother and daughter was described with extraordinary accuracy in a play of Terence Rattigan, called "Separate Tables". (Her behaviour was the main reason, I think, why the rest of the family had taken to drink).

This was particularly upsetting for my friend as she loved all her family unconditionally, and does so still, even after being cheated out of her small inheritance.

But she attracted other people to her who were also heavy drinkers, and who also had no qualms about dragging her down with them, and it used to make me quite bitter. Then recently, I realised that she had such an angelic nature that some of them probably saught her company because she, in sense, would have validated them in their own eyes, increased their own self-esteem. "If such a sweet person can fall down in such a way, maybe I'm not necessarily so guilty and bad". Others were just sociopaths.

You're taking on a heavy cross, bleedingheart, but that's what a deep and genuine love is about. Love in spite of winning nothing but anger and rejection in return. If you reflect on the Gospels, you'll know what I mean.